Read Online Madman on a Drum by David Housewright - Free Book Online Page A

Landing after its founder, Pierre “Pig’s Eye” Parrant, a notorious and thoroughly likable fur trader turned moonshiner, until a French priest came along and decided it wasn’t PC enough. That was just the beginning. St. Paul had always been a city of neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods used to have names with character: Beanville, Bohemian Flats, Frogtown, Swede’s Hollow, Cornbread Valley, Oatmeal Hill, Shadow Falls. Sure, some people still use those names, old-timers mostly, only you’ll rarely see them in official documents. That’s because in 1975, St. Paul formed community councils in seventeen districts and charged them with creating new “neighborhoods” whose boundaries were influenced more by streets and traffic flow than by shared identity and communal history. These districts were given politically acceptable names like Como, Midway, Summit Hill, and Battle Creek. Take “the Badlands.” That’s a name now known to only a few people who actually grew up there and a handful of researchers at the Minnesota Historical Society. Yet at one time, the Badlands was as prosperous a neighborhood as any in St. Paul. ’Course, that was before Interstates 94 and 35E carved it into pieces and scattered them among the conservatively named Thomas-Dale, Downtown, and Dayton’s Bluff districts.
    Karen directed me northeast from the capitol to a residential street near the Gillette Children’s Hospital, where we found a sprawling two-story building shaped like a horse shoe with a courtyard at the center. It had once been a hotel, considered quite swank, that was rumored to have been the last hideout of Dillinger accomplice Homer Van Meter before he was gunned down by cops at University and Marion Street, about half a mile away.
    That’s another thing. We used to have celebrity gangsters living in our midst. Now it’s just punks. And politicians.
    The hotel was old and worn, with crumbling sidewalks and a facade in dire need of paint. There was a low Cyclone fence surrounding it, and I wondered if the people living nearby and sending their kids to the Franklin Elementary School knew what it was used for.
    We parked in back on broken asphalt and hard-packed earth, found an opening in the fence, and followed it around the outside of the building to the top of the horse shoe. There was a balcony that ran the length of the second floor, and we walked beneath it toward the office. An old man sat in a frayed lawn chair at the base of the horse shoe. He was staring at the courtyard beyond. It was overgrown with weeds and uncut grass that grew between the broken stones. In the center was an unused fountain. The floor of the fountain was cracked, and I doubted it could hold water. It was an altogether depressing sight, yet the old man found something there that made him smile nonetheless.
    We stepped inside two glass doors and were greeted by a long, high, battle-scarred desk that was once the center of the hotel. It now served a lone receptionist. Karen greeted her as Agnes and asked if Roger Colfax was in. Agnes smiled as if they were old friends, and I wondered if Karen spent a lot of time here.
    â€œYeah, sure, you betcha,” Agnes said, and I winced. Ever since the Coen brothers film came out, I am quick to tell outsiders that no one in Minnesota actually speaks with the vocabulary and accents of the characters in Fargo. Only to my embarrassment, I am reminded from time to time that some of us do.
    Agnes led us to an office just off the reception area with badly chipped wood paneling, a threadbare carpet, and furniture that should have been replaced a decade ago. Cardboard boxes, used as file cabinets, were stacked on both sides of the desk. There was an ancient air conditioner sitting precariously on a windowsill; a stiff wind could probably topple it from its perch.
    Agnes said, “Wouldja lookit who came for a visit, now.”
    Roger rose quickly from the